‘Journey to Justice’ tour ‘personal’ for EPA head

RESERVE, LA. » Michael Coleman’s house is the last one standing on his tiny street, squeezed between a sprawling oil refinery that keeps him up at night and a massive grain elevator that covers his pickup with dust and worsens his breathing problems.

Coleman, 65, points to the smokestacks billowing just outside his backyard. “Oh, when the plants came in, they built right on top of us,” he said. “We was surrounded by sugarcane, and now we’re surrounded by (industrial) plants.”

The oil company offered him a buyout, but Coleman rejected it. “I’m waiting for a fair shake,” he said. In the meantime, he copes with high blood pressure, thyroid problems and other health issues that he attributes to decades of pollution from his industrial neighbors, a Marathon Petroleum refinery and a Cargill grain depot.

St. John the Baptist Parish, where Coleman lives, is part of an 85-mile (137-kilometer) stretch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge officially known as the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor, but more commonly called Cancer Alley.

The region contains several hotspots where cancer risks are far above levels deemed acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited Coleman and other residents during a five-day trip from Mississippi to Texas in midNovember that highlighted low-income, mostly minority communities adversely affected by industrial pollution.

A Toxics Release Inventory prepared by EPA shows that minority groups make up 56% of those living near toxic sites such as refineries, landfills and chemical plants. Negative effects include chronic health problems such as asthma, diabetes and hypertension.

“I’m able to put faces and names with this term that we call environmental justice,” Regan said at a news conference outside Coleman’s ramshackle home, where a blue tarp covers roof damage from Hurricane Ida.

“This is what we are talking about when we talk about ‘fence-line communities’ — those communities who have been disproportionately impacted by pollution and are having to live in these conditions,” Regan said.

A former environmental regulator in his native North Carolina, Regan has made environmental justice a top priority since taking over as EPA head in March. As the first Black man to lead the agency, the issue “is really personal for me, as well as professional,” Regan said in an interview.

“As I look at many of the folks in these communities, they look just like me. They look just like my son, and it’s really tough to see them question the quality of their drinking water,” he said.

Historically marginalized communities like St. John and St. James will benefit from the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden, Regan said.

The law includes $55 billion for water and wastewater infrastructure, while a sweeping climate and social policy bill pending in the Senate would pump more than twice that amount into EPA programs to clean up the environment and address water and environmental justice issues.

While legislation can help, Regan acknowledged that decades of neglect and widespread health problems among mostly Black and Brown communities won’t be solved overnight.

Loose permitting requirements for industrial sites, along with exclusionary zoning laws and housing practices, have long funneled racial and ethnic minorities into areas near toxic pollutants at rates far higher than the overall population.

At a congressional hearing in October, oil company executives sidestepped questions about whether refineries and other facilities are more likely to be located in low-income and minority communities.

“We’ve got oil refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast, and we’re very proud to be community members there,” Shell Oil President Gretchen Watkins told Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.

In Louisiana, a recent inspector general’s report faulted EPA for failing to protect St. John, St. James and other parishes from chloroprene and ethylene oxide, toxic chemicals used in industrial processes.

“If EPA, the federal government, the state government, the local governments had been doing things correctly, we wouldn’t be here, Regan said in St. John.

He said EPA “for the first time” is not questioning whether environmental injustices exist.

“We are actually acknowledging that they do,” he said. “The message here to these communities is, we have to do better and we will do better.”